Generally, payments for goods and/or services must be authorized prior to such payments being made to a provider of the goods and/or services. For example, such authorization has traditionally included signing a credit card receipt for the purchase of a good and/or service. With the widespread availability of goods and/or services that may be purchased over a network (e.g. the Internet, etc.), various techniques have been implemented for authorizing payments over networks. Unfortunately, such techniques have exhibited various limitations.
Just by way of example, conventional techniques utilized for authorizing a payment via a network have many times required a user to log into an account capable of being utilized to make a payment (e.g. a Paypal™ account, etc.). As another example, users purchasing via online retail stores have usually been required to enter their personal information (e.g. name, address, etc.) and payment information (e.g. credit card number, etc.) into such online retail stores for making a payment, thus disclosing to the online retail stores sensitive information.
There is thus a need for addressing these and/or other issues associated with the prior art.